20 word description: Babbel is an Internet application for playful language learning. There are intuitive lessons and diverse opportunities to connect.

CEO's 100 word description: Babbel provides an enjoyable, intuitive approach to learning via cutting-edge applications, audio cues and user-generated visuals. It also enables users around the globe to connect with and learn from each other. With courses in German, English, French, Italian and Spanish, Babbel.com blends social networking with playful but effective vocabulary-developing and sentence-building tools. The system manages language learning content for review until the material has been mastered. Created entirely with Ruby On Rails and Adobe FLEX, Babbel also features game-like multimedia "trainers," exercise applications lasting 2-5 minutes. The community of currently more than 50,000 is growing rapidly.

Mashable's Take: Babbel is the latest site to teach new languages through a social Web-based immersion program, where the majority of the content is packaged into lessons created by Babbel. So far, languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, English, and German are supported. Each lesson package contains material pertaining to a different theme, such as travel or business, so you can learn a series of words and phrases within context.

I tried a few lessons for Spanish and found that each portion of the lesson goes over the material in three different ways, incorporating textual, audio and visual stimulus for each word or phrase. First you hear and see the image, the word or phrase, and its meaning. Then you hear the word or phrase and match it to the correct image. Lastly, you see the image and type the first letter of the phrase. You may not become fluent through such a program, but it certainly gives you the basics you'll need in order to get by.

Images are actually a pretty important aspect of Babbel's program, as they are the most social portion of Babbel. Users are encouraged to upload their own images (or import from Flickr), which can be viewed by other users. This is a user-generated way to increase the type of learning material available on Babbel, though it doesn't appear to be directly involved in any of the lessons. While you can also view user profiles, send them messages, and set up learning buddies, the overall social networking capabilities of Babbel are quite limited.

There are a number of working theories for how languages can best be learned in a Web-based environment, with some using widgets to dynamically provide learning material, and others relying far more on users to generate and translate learning material. Web-based environments are still fluid places for any type of learning program, and it's particularly difficult to fully engage a user base for learning other languages, but increasing ways in which to easily share multimedia content will continue to make the leveraging of large user bases for language-learning a better process.

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